Delusions of Literary Grandeur: A Writer’s Struggle with Her Own Magnificence

I don’t know about you but the writer in me has an overwhelming belief that the tome to end all tomes is locked inside her head. A magnum opus, if you will, that will blow all other magnum opuses (opei?) out of the water. All she has to do is get that baby on paper and sweet ambrosia will spill forth in abundance, deifying the writer and gilding her words in gold.

In short, the writer in me suffers (greatly, it seems) from delusions of literary grandeur.

This is the source of all her woes: why she suffers from writer’s block and why she hardly ever (pretty much never) finishes anything she sits down to write. You see, the writer in me has such a disproportionately skewed opinion of her own potential that the reality always falls vastly short of the dream and why it keeps her reaching for the bottle time and time again.

It’s that age-old quest for perfection, people.

And the age-old excuse for not writing.

You see, one must wait for the fates to align in order for great prose to be wrought. Or so the writer in me proclaims. There is a time and a place for greatness and this isn’t it. Today just doesn’t feel like a writing day.

Perhaps tomorrow the Gods of Prose will smile upon my sorry soul and my tale will finally get told.

So until tomorrow, I’ll just sit here watching telly and getting pissed.

The pragmatist in me though, screams for rationality. The real world citizen in me, with all her flaws and foibles, wants to take that self-obsessed, denizen of delusion and punch her in the damn face. ‘Get over yourself!’ She wants to say. ‘Stop arsing around and get some words on paper!’

Because until you do you’re not a writer so stop telling people that you are. And FYI? Only through sheer tenacity and the expulsion of bodily fluids (granted, optional) will your dreams even have the chance to become a reality. Never mind a world event.

It’s a bitter pill, I know, but there is no gemstone that wasn’t first mined, shaped and polished. No masterpiece that wasn’t first dreamt, honed, bled over and despised for its imperfections.